ABSTRACT
This incident is, in many ways, emblematic of how southern Europeans are reacting to unemployment in the late 1990s. Their target was the state and not the private sector. Their demands used rights discourse and were built around an explicit comparison. Their tactics were quite literally spectacular, designed to attract the mass media and their effects on actual policy-making were probably nil. The incident is most emblematic in illustrating how the unemployed are straining to craft new identities and new means of extracting more responsiveness from their states.
